It's been awhile since I last talked about photo editing on your iPhone, so today I'm going to take you through a few simple steps I took to create the photo above on my iPhone.

This photo was taken at a friend's birthday party. Of course I always would choose taking photos with my DSLR over my iPhone, but this particular day I chose to leave the big camera at home since I knew that my hands would be pretty full taking care of both boys and chatting with the other party guests. And the really nice thing was that I didn't have to dump the photos from my memory card to my computer and edit it later. Instead, I performed these easy edits on my phone while my husband drove us home from the party afterwards.

So here we go!

Step 1: Taking the Photo.

I have something important to tell you about, if you don't know about it already. It's called AE/AF Lock or Auto-Exposure/Auto-Focus Lock. If you're not using this feature when you take photos on your iPhone it's the equivalent to using a DSLR on auto vs manual. This will take your iPhone photos to the next level. And it's as simple as touching and holding your screen for a couple seconds prior to snapping the photo.

Ever held your phone up and the image is just way under-exposed? Next time try tapping and holding a darker area on the image to correctly expose your image.

In the example below, the yellow box shows where I held down to tell the camera that I wanted a lighter photo rather than the darker one it was auto-exposing for.

donyaluana-iphone-photo-tutorial-01

Step 2: Editing the Photo.

My most used photo editing app is Pic•Tap•Go. It is just so darn useful and easy! I knew right away that I'd need to lighten up the image and correct the white balance (warm it up). After that I added some contrast with Crispity and I love the look of a little bit of Skinny Jeans at the end.

After saving the image in Pic•Tap•Go, I opened it up in another app. The second app I used for this photo was Picfx. I hadn't used this app in awhile, but I knew that the fake bokeh would be a fun filter to add to cute birthday princess photo.

donyaluana-iphone-photo-tutorial-02

Step 3: Share That Photo!

Of course the third step is to share that photo with all your friends and family. Whether it's Facebook, Instagram, or in an email. :)